Manuel Fraga Iribarne (Spanish pronunciation: [maˈnwel ˈfɾaɣa iɾiˈβarne]; 23 November 1922 – 15 January 2012) was a Spanish professor and politician in Francoist Spain, who was also the founder of the People's Party. Fraga was the Minister of Information and Tourism between 1962 and 1969, Ambassador to the United Kingdom between 1973 and 1975, Minister of the Interior in 1975, Deputy Prime Minister between 1975 and 1976, President of the People's Alliance/People's Party between 1979 and 1990 and President of the Regional Government of Galicia between 1990 and 2005. He has also been both a Deputy in the Congress and a Senator.

Fraga started in the Franco cabinet in 1962 as Minister of Information and tourism. Fraga authorized the execution of political prisoners under the Francoist State. A notable case is the execution of communist leader Julián Grimau, whom he called "that little gentleman" (Spanish: ese caballerete) in a press conference when asked about his detention and death sentence. His death sentence caused a large controversy outside of Spain. Grimau was executed by firing squad in 1963. Fraga never publicly apologized or expressed regret for Grimau's execution.

Another notable case was the assassination by Spanish police of Enrique Ruano, a student activist who opposed the Francoist State. Fraga telephoned Ruano's father and threatened to arrest his other daughter, Margot, who was also an anti-Francoist, unless she immediately stopped her activism. The then-director of Spanish newspaper ABC, Torcuato Luca de Tena, later confessed that Fraga ordered him to publish a manipulated copy of Ruano's personal diary in order to present Ruano as a mentally unstable person who killed himself.[2]

Fraga also established himself as one of the more prominent members of a reformist faction in the government who favoured opening up the State from above. He introduced an a posteriori censorship law, which was based on lifting pre-publication censorship and a reduction in its strictness. Additionally, a certain sexual liberality in films was popularly summarized in the expression Con Fraga hasta la braga[4][5] ("With Fraga [you can see] even the panties"). His depart from the government was prompted by the MATESA affair: the debt of the important publisher Manuel Salvat Dalmau was tangled with members of the Opus Dei, faction which Fraga opposed, and then he released the news. The caudillo Franco expelled both sectors.

After a brief period as Spain's ambassador in the United Kingdom, which ended with Franco's death in 1975, Fraga was appointed vice president of the government (deputy prime minister) and Interior Minister (Ministro de Gobernación) on 12 December 1975,[6] under Carlos Arias Navarro, a post he held until 5 July 1976.[6][7] This was the first government with Juan Carlos I as chief of state.

Although Fraga was known to favor liberalising the State from above, he himself favoured an extremely gradual transition to full democracy. The drastic measures he took as interior minister and head of state security during the first days of the Spanish transition to democracy gave him a reputation for heavy-handedness, and deeply damaged his popularity. The phrase "¡La calle es mía!" ("Streets are mine!") was attributed to him[8] as his answer to complaints of police repression of street protests: he claimed that the streets did not belong to the "people" but to the state. He was known to be an admirer of Cánovas del Castillo. During a clash at the Church of St. Francis of Assisi in Vitoria (Euskadi) between police and striking workers, on Fraga's orders the police stormed into a packed church into which 4,000 demonstrators had retreated and went on a shooting spree, resulting in five dead and over 100 wounded.[6]

Fraga was one of the writers of the new Spanish constitution approved in 1978. Along with other former reformist members of the Francoist State, he founded the People's Alliance (Alianza Popular – AP), and became its president. Although he tried to brand the party as a mainstream conservative party, the people did not trust him due to large number of former Francoists in the party, combined with his performance as interior minister. The party fared poorly in its first years, but after the 1982 crisis and the collapse of the UCD, the centrist party that had won the first two democratic elections, AP became the second party in Spain.

With the AP in headlong decline, Fraga resumed the leadership of the party in 1989. With the addition of several lesser Christian democratic parties and the remnants of the Democratic Center Union, he refounded the People's Alliance as the People's Party (Partido Popular – PP). Later in the same year, Fraga encouraged the election of José María Aznar as the party's new president. Fraga was then appointed as honorary president of the PP.

Manuel Fraga returned to his Galician homeland in 1989, winning that year's regional presidential election as head of the People's Party in Galicia (PPdeG), which had won a one-seat majority in the election.[10] He remained in charge for almost 15 years until 2005, when the PPdeG lost its overall majority.

Fraga saw his credibility damaged in late 2002, when the oil tanker ship Prestige sank off the Galician coast. It caused a massive oil spill that affected the shoreline in the northwest of the region. Fraga was said to have been slow to react and unable, or unwilling, to handle the situation. In 2004, a power struggle between factions of PPdeG further hurt the party's image.

Fraga was one of the writers of the democratic constitution and spent part of his political career lessening the censorship law during the latter years of the Francoist State. However he had openly admitted admiration for General Franco and the Francoist State in public on several different occasions. He was renowned for his temper tantrums in public at not being referred to or addressed as Don Manuel. He most famously shouted during a television interview, completely unaware the camera was filming and the show was being broadcast live on air. Manuel Fraga Iribarne was probably one of the most important and yet controversial politicians in modern Spain.

To his supporters, Fraga was a Galician hero who throughout his rule, modernised Galicia and built up a fair level of tourism to the region[citation needed]. He built great roads and motorways and in 2000, he approved the Galician Plan to build Spain's first high speed bullet train.

To his opponents he always was a dinosaur from the Franco regime.[11] He was a keen follower of Carl Schmitt's ideas,[12] and granted the German political theorist honorary membership to the Institute of Political Studies in 1962,[13] in a ceremony where he praised him as a "revered master".[14] Fraga identified himself with the figure of Antonio Cánovas del Castillo in 1976 for the first time; this idea of identification between Cánovas and Fraga was reinforced by historiographical trends close to Fraga in the 1980s in order to commend his figure.[15] Despite their political differences, he developed a close friendship with Fidel Castro,[16] himself of Galician descent, who met with Fraga in Galicia during a visit to Spain in 1992.[17]